Welcome to the OpenMarket Tech Blog

OpenMarket's Director of Engineering Jonas Hellborg explains what this blog is for and why you might be interested.

Jonas Hellborg – November 24, 2018

Our technical teams at OpenMarket solve interesting and challenging problems every day. Our software engineers meet those challenges in a flexible and creative environment, which helps us attract and retain exceptionally talented people.

OpenMarket’s primary offerings provide platforms that allow enterprises to communicate with their customers via mobile messaging. In large part, those mobile messages are SMS messages, some of which are sent to the end users’ handsets and some sent from those handsets.

What makes this interesting or challenging? After all, SMS messaging has been around for more than 25 years. The problems we solve involve creating global, high-volume, high-availability, and high-performance services.

Let’s consider a typical use case – two factor authentication. We all have experience with this; when trying to log in to a bank or airline, retail or social media account. To confirm my identity, the site wants to send me a validation code. Often, this code is sent via SMS message, which is sent through OpenMarket’s platform. For me, as the end user, I want to get that message exactly once, as quickly as possible, no matter where I am. After all, I’m watching my mobile phone, thinking “It’s already been 4 seconds. Where is my code!” so the OpenMarket platform needs to be fast. With our platforms, we send billions of messages like that each month, so we need scalability in addition to speed and reliability. Finally, the mobile handset could be anywhere in the world, so we need to have connections to hundreds of suppliers and carriers across the globe.

Much of our interesting work involves building and managing the platforms that reliably handle traffic like that. Meanwhile, systems that process billions of messages generate a lot of data and we have a data management team working on collecting, storing, enriching and analyzing all that data. In addition, we build many complementary products and services that help our customers create, manage and orchestrate the delivery of all those mobile messages. Each of these teams tackles fascinating issues every day.

Welcome to our tech blog. I invite you to come back from time to time, to learn more about the kind of work we’re doing. If it sounds interesting, take a look at our careers page to join the fun.

Finally, we’re interested in what you think. If you have comments or suggestions about our blog, please email me directly (jonas.hellborg@openmarket.com) and I promise that I’ll respond.